Henri Bergson Quotes

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

We regard intelligence as man's main characteristic and we know that there is no superiority which intelligence cannot confer on us, no inferiority for which it cannot compensate.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Think like a man of action act like a man of thought.

The present contains nothing more than the past and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality.

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

To exist is to change to change is to mature to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

The question is precisely to know whether the past has ceased to exist, or ceased to be useful...

No two moments are identical in a conscious being

Creation signifies, above all, emotion, and that not in literature or art alone. We all know the concentration and effort implied in scientific discovery. Genius has been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains.